The subtitle for Donald Spoto`s new biography of Lotte Lenya is ``A Life,`` and A Life indeed it was.

Born into poverty in Austria in 1878, she was an abused child, often beaten by her drunken father. At 15, she left home to live with an aunt in Zurich, and, having discovered the world of the theater there, she and a girlfriend, with whom she had formed a dance act, went to Berlin to begin a career on the stage.

In Berlin, she met the composer Kurt Weill and formed the great lasting alliance of her life. A member of the original cast of the landmark Weill-Bertolt Brecht works, ``The Threepenny Opera`` and ``Mahagonny,`` she married Weill twice, once in Germany and then again, after divorcing him in 1933, when they had relocated in the United States. Both were unfaithful, Lenya taking several lovers of both sexes. However, according to the documentation of letters and extensive reminiscences of friends quoted by Spoto, she and Weill were devoted to each other; after he died, in 1950, much of Lenya`s life was spent in perpetuating his memory and his music.

``The only thing that keeps me going,`` she wrote to a friend shortly after Weill`s death, ``is his music and the only desire I still retain-everything I learned through him in these twenty-five years-is to fight for his music, to keep it alive. . . .``

Before her own death, which came in 1981 after a painful struggle against cancer, Lenya had married and lost three homosexual husbands, two by death and one by divorce. (Briefly and unsuccessfully, Spoto reports, she also pursued Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the United Nations.)

Her second husband, George Davis, a talented, self-destructive editor, helped greatly to resurrect her career by steering her through the triumphant off-Broadway revival of ``The Threepenny Opera`` in 1954 and the key recordings of Weill`s music that she made in the 1950s.

Forever linked with Weill, hailed for her definitive interpretations of the Weill-Brecht canon (and sporadically engaged in complicated copyright battles with Brecht`s widow), she nonetheless established her own identity as an actress in such films as ``From Russia, With Love,`` a James Bond movie in which she portrayed a cruel lesbian assassin, and the 1967 musical

``Cabaret,`` in which she was the embittered landlady Fraulein Schneider.

She had a craggy face and a croaking voice, but, as the many critical reactions cited by Spoto testify, she held the stage with an arresting presence.

Even at moments of success, however, she often was in distress. On the opening night of ``Cabaret,`` she had to leave the post-performance party early in order to take her alcoholic husband home. In her last, painful weeks, she was a virtual recluse, tended by a woman who guarded her from visits by old friends.

Spoto`s account of this turbulent life is mundane and over-particularized. It`s not necessary, for example, to sketch in a short history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a prelude to Lenya`s birth. But the author has gone through the Weill/Lenya Archive of the Yale University Music Library and unearthed many touching-and chilling-examples of Lenya`s reminiscences and correspondence.

Here she is, writing to a friend after the death of her third husband, the painter Russell Detwiler:

``. . . One has to find oneself again and that`s it. But dear God, it is a struggle . . . I try to keep busy . . . But my heart is not in it. I know from my past experience that time eventually will help and that`s what I am waiting for . . . I try my best to find a reason to go on living.``

``Marlene,`` translated from the German-and it is High German, she points out-is the scattershot autobiography of Marlene Dietrich, a collection of memories, idle thoughts and clarifications on the life of one of the movies`

great images, now living in seclusion in Paris.

Her name really is Marlene Dietrich, she says, and she was a good girl, the child of well-to-do parents in Berlin. She owes her career to Josef von Sternberg, the director who guided her through ``The Blue Angel`` in Germany and brought her to the United States with him. She scorns the Oscars; she loved, platonically, Ernest Hemingway; she adores composer-conductor Burt Bachrach, who shaped her musical stage career in the late 1950s; she hated the teutonic arrogance of director Fritz Lang; she believes Orson Welles was a genius.

A typical passage, on the composer Harold Arlen: ``How I loved him! How I love his music! How I loved his talent, his intelligence!``

Odd, sometimes intriguing bits of information on her reading habits, her homemaking hints and, above all, her shrewd professional`s insight into the business of filmmaking dot the book, which is forgettable but valuable.